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CPD Lays Out New Use of Force Policy that Could Put COPS in DANGER

May 18, 2017

FOX 32 NEWS, The Chicago Police Department, struggling to regain public trust in the wake of a video of a white officer fatally shooting a black teenager 16 times, on Wednesday released a new use of force policy that requires officers undergo de-escalation training and imposes stricter rules on when they can fire their weapons at fleeing suspects.

Under the final version of the policy -which replaces a policy in place since 2002 – officers can no longer shoot a fleeing suspect after they committed or tried to commit a felony using deadly force. Now, officers can only shoot a fleeing suspect “only as a last resort to prevent an immediate threat of death of great bodily harm posed to officers or another person.” It also expands the definition of deadly force to include chokeholds and striking a person’s head with an “impact weapon.”

The new policy also addresses long held public suspicions that there is a so-called “code of silence” in which officers stay quiet about or conceal misconduct by other officers – suspicions that the department itself confirmed last year when Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson recommended that officers at the scene of the 2014 shooting of teenager Laquan McDonald be fired for filing false reports.

Under the new policy, any officer who witnesses another officer violating the use-of-force policy must intervene and report the incident to a supervisor. Further, it explicitly bars anyone from retaliating against an officer who reports such an incident or cooperates with an excessive force investigation. Continue Reading